Short answers, pulled from the story.
William Hogarth was an English painter, engraver, satirist, cartoonist and writer who lived from 1697 to 1764. He was the most significant English artist of his generation, best known for the moral series A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress, and Marriage A-la-Mode.
A Harlot's Progress was Hogarth's earliest moral series, completed in 1731, made of six chronological scenes. It follows a country girl who begins prostituting, starting with a meeting with a bawd and ending with her funeral after death from venereal disease.
Hogarth's Act, formally the Engravers' Copyright Act, became law on the 25th of June 1735 after Hogarth lobbied parliament against pirated reproductions of his prints. It was the first copyright law to cover visual works and the first to recognise the authorial rights of an individual artist.
Beer Street and Gin Lane, both published in 1751, contrasted a healthy, prosperous city drinking English beer with the ruin caused by gin. The prints were issued in support of the Gin Act 1751, and Gin Lane echoes Judith Dufour, who strangled her baby to sell its clothes for gin money.
Hogarth was paid £200 in 1745 for painting the actor David Garrick as Richard III. He wrote that this was more than any English artist ever received for a single portrait.
Hogarth died on the 26th of October 1764 in Leicester Fields, in the arms of his servant Mary Lewis. After boasting of eating a pound of beefsteaks he began vomiting violently, ringing his bell so hard it broke, and died about two hours later; John Nichols claimed an aneurysm and Horace Walpole a dropsy of his breast.